


Seamful Design

by ConnivingOphelia



Category: The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Genre: F/M, Hand Jobs, Het, Hurt/Comfort, Mildly Dubious Consent, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-29
Updated: 2017-05-29
Packaged: 2018-11-06 05:45:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11029875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConnivingOphelia/pseuds/ConnivingOphelia
Summary: The townsfolk don't know what to make of Dr. Finklestein's new creation. To him, she's a marvel, a wonder of biomedical engineering, his greatest achievement thus far. She's his masterpiece. But she's beginning to get restless.





	Seamful Design

She was two weeks old when she realized everyone was staring at her.

It was her second time shopping at the market, but the first time she was allowed to go unaccompanied. A tacit acknowledgment of her two-week birthday – no, not birth, the Doctor insisted she didn’t have a birthday, since she had never technically been born. He liked to argue semantics. It was the two-week anniversary of her animation, of her sentience, of the spark that flared across her nascent nervous system as the breath of life filled her lungs.

She was two weeks old, and everyone was staring.

Eyes downcast and half-hidden behind her curtain of dark hair, she moved through the aisles with the shopping basket clutched before her in both hands. The shopping list was only three items long – the Doctor hadn’t wanted to overburden her on her very first solo outing – but the self-consciousness overwhelmed her and she couldn’t remember what she was supposed to buy. She walked down an aisle at random without seeing anything on the shelves, concentrating only on putting one foot in front of the other without wobbling.

She stopped near a stacked display of cans. She could feel eyes on her from behind, their force heavy and unseen as a humid fog. Their whispers grew louder the longer they stared.

“Look at it _move_ , though. It looks alive.”

She picked up a can without seeing it, turned it over to look at the label’s hazy words swimming across its surface.

“I think it _is_ alive,” hissed a second voice. “Technically.”

She reached up to replace the can in its spot, and it slipped from her fingers and hit the floor with a resonant thud. She stooped to snatch it up before it rolled away.

“Maybe alive, _definitely_ clumsy.”

“Well, look how little its hands are. Why would he make a lady creation with such small hands?”

“I guess they don’t need to be all that big to wrap around his tiny dick.”

“Gross, gross, gross!” Both voices snorted with muffled laughter. 

She threw the can into her basket and slipped around the corner, heart pounding, vision blurred. The next aisle was empty. The weight of their stares and their laughter still pressed up against her, along with temptation to drop the basket on the floor and flee for home. She squeezed her eyes shut and breathed deeply. She couldn’t fail. Not on her first unaccompanied outing. Not on her two-week birthday. Squaring her shoulders, she set off with calm and measured steps down the aisle.

They kept staring.

She approached the first aid supplies and scanned the shelves for the hydrogen peroxide, brushing past a large hairy woman studying the selection of gauze. “Excuse me,” she murmured in her most polite voice. The woman glanced sharply up, then drew back like a melting shadow as she mumbled an inaudible reply. And she stared.

The glass peroxide bottle clattered against the can in the basket as she threw it in; the items rattled with her rapid steps as she made her way to the man at the cash register. _Not so fast, not so fast_ , she reminded herself, but her legs wouldn’t slow their anxious pace. She all but flung the basket to the clerk at the register, then clutched the edge of the counter and concentrated on breathing.

The register’s bell jangled. Across the counter before her lowered eyes, shadows marched back and forth as the clerk rang up and bagged her things. When the movement stilled, she forced her eyes up to meet the clerk’s gaze. He was already intently studying her features like assessing the quality of a dubious produce delivery. She bit her lip and steeled herself against the impulse to shrink away. The clerk cocked his head to one side, his many eyestalks swaying with the movement. “Put it on his account?” he asked.

She blinked. “Pardon me?”

The clerk momentarily narrowed his numerous eyes at her before snapping his features back into a professional expression. “Does the Doctor want me to charge this order to his account?” He spoke slower this time, drawing out his vowels and enunciating each syllable.

“Oh. Um.” She looked down at her hands, at her fingers’ involuntary fidgeting. “Yes, thank you. Please.”

The paper bag rattled as the clerk handed it over. As she reached to close her hand around it, her fingers brushed his hand. She felt his webbed digits against her wrist for an instant before he yanked his hand away, as quick as if her touch had burned him. He cleared his throat and glanced around. “Yes. Well. Thank you for shopping.”

“Thank you,” she murmured, and she scuttled to the exit and hurried home with lowered head and wobbly legs.

Safe inside the foyer of the laboratory, she leaned back against the heavy steel door and closed her eyes. It was over, but it wasn’t. The tingling of the stares still lingered all over her. 

The thin, high whirring droned in from the next room. She opened her eyes to see the Doctor propelling his chair toward her. His dark glasses and serious expression did nothing to hide from her his expectant excitement. “Ah, Sally. You’re back. It took just a little longer than I anticipated, but you’ve done it. Did you get what I told you?”

Without a word, without meeting his eyes, she dropped the bag into his lap. The crinkling of the brown paper seemed unnaturally loud as it echoed through the high, round walls of the room. She stared at the floor and waited with mounting anxiety.

“Oh, my dear. Well, you managed the hydrogen peroxide at least. And the bottle’s the correct size, so well done there. But where are the other things? And what’s this?” He pulled out the can she’d blindly tossed in as she fled the whispers and the stares. “Cat food? What exactly was the thought process here?” He looked up at her, not with anger, but with pure scientific curiosity. Working out the defect in her coding.

“I…there wasn’t…I didn’t mean to. They made me nervous.”

“They made you nervous.”

“They stared. They _whispered._ ”

The Doctor dropped the items back into the paper bag. “Of course they stared. You’re a marvel. A wonder of biomedical engineering. My crowning achievement thus far.” He creased the top of the bag and folded it over into a neat rectangle. “You mustn’t let it upset you. The rabble are generally too stupid to comprehend the sheer magnitude of what your existence means.”

She opened her mouth to protest, then closed it again and said nothing. She fixed her eyes on his hands, encased in the rubber gloves, as he folded the top of the bag over again with another perfect crease. His touch was always so sure and agile, his dexterous ability so customary he rarely even noticed it. But she did. She liked to watch his hands. But now, after the whispers in the market, that simple pleasure seemed tarnished and ugly. She took the bag as he handed it to her, curled her fingers around the fold he’d created. It was a perfect fit for her grasp. Everything he ever created was always seamlessly fitted to its purpose. He deftly maneuvered the chair in a tight rotation and started up the long ramp upstairs. Without a word, Sally followed.

 

~+~+~

 

She was one month old. The staring began to change.

They grew accustomed to her; they were polite to her. But behind their smiles, below the surface of their small-talk, she felt their chill. The looks she knew they exchanged behind her back felt laden with lascivious contempt. Though her gait steadied and her voice stopped wavering, her anxiety never fully receded.

Arms filled with herb cuttings from her little garden plot, she walked back home from the graveyard. It was just after sunset, and the sky shimmered with a diminishing grey light. By the fountain in the town square, the whiny tones of a crying child rose above the rush of the water. She stopped.

The little corpse child crouched over a storm drain, pushing his pudgy arm through the grate. “I can’t get it!” he wailed. “Mama! It’s right there, but I can’t reach it!”

His mother took up almost an entire park bench by herself and made no move to get up. “I told you to quit throwing it over there.” She turned her head to take a drag from her cigarette. “Maybe you’ll mind me next time.”

The boy sat down on the pavement with a defeated thud. “It’s my favorite,” he sobbed.

Sally drew closer to the sad little tableau in the square – the crying child, the indifferent mother, the dark storm drain. “Maybe I can help,” she said.

The corpse child looked up at her and wiped at his nose with the back of one fat hand. He turned back to his mother on the bench, whose only movement was the expression on her face that transformed from bored and unsympathetic into a sneering, haughty smile. When she didn’t protest, the boy turned back to Sally and pointed into the depths of the storm drain. “I lost my ball. It rolled into there.”

Sally gave him what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “That’s easy. Watch.” She knelt onto the stones beside him and lay her bouquet of herbs on the ground, and then she plucked at the end of the thread on her left wrist. With a few tugs the thread unraveled and her hand dropped to the ground, gently flexing. The boy gasped as her hand disappeared through the grate. 

She felt around the wet walls of the storm drain entrance for a moment before she brushed up against it. The movement propelled the ball down the path of the drain just a few inches more, but she snagged it before it got away. Back up to the light she carried it, wet and dripping with bits of slimy black lichen. Now that she could see it, she realized it was more of a mummified head than it was strictly a toy ball. The corpse child squealed and reached for it, then drew back from the disembodied hand.

“No, it’s all right. Here.” She dropped the ball in front of him and drew her hand back, up to the crook of her elbow. She expected the boy to grab the ball and run, but instead he watched with rapt attention as she assembled her needle and thread and began affixing her hand back on again.

“Doesn’t it hurt?” asked the corpse child, as the needle slid over and under, the thread pulled taut against her skin.

“No, not at all.” She gave him what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “I can’t feel pain.”

“Not at _all_?”

Her smile faltered. He seemed almost appalled with surprise. “Not at all.”

“But…but how?”

With one final twist of her right hand, she knotted the last stitch. “It’s just how the Doctor made me.”

“Wow.” The boy stood and backed away a few steps with his eyes still on her, then he turned and ran across the courtyard in a lumbering waddle, bouncing the ball against the cobblestones as he went.

Sally stood and brushed off her legs, flexed her left hand to test the reattachment. From her place on the bench, the boy’s mother struggled to lean forward to her purse, her ample cleavage threatening to spill from the drooping neckline of her faded muumuu. She fished another cigarette out of her purse, then straightened up with labored breath, lit it with the flare of a match. She smirked at Sally. “That Doctor sure put in some interesting special features when he cooked you up, didn’t he?”

She didn’t know how to respond. The fountain behind her filled the silence with a steady rush, and the receding echoes of the bouncing ball kept irregular time. “Excuse me?”

“Detaching limbs, body parts moving around on their own, and nothing hurts. He must have a load of fun with you. I never knew he was such a kinky bastard.”

The hot rush of blood to her cheeks left her lightheaded. “He’s a genius.”

The woman’s hoarse laugh dissolved into a cough. “Sure, I never said he wasn’t. What a raging case of Stockholm syndrome he gave you.” She sucked in another drag of smoke and blew it back in Sally’s direction.

“Excuse me,” Sally murmured, turning and hurrying back toward the laboratory. As she pushed through the door and started up the ramp, it occurred to her she’d left all the herb cuttings on the cobblestones by the storm drain. For a moment she hesitated halfway up the ramp, afraid to come home without them, afraid to return to the square to retrieve them. She thought again of the crude remarks from the corpse woman, and decided she’d rather accept a failed task than hear those words again. The humiliated flush returned to her face, and she took a moment on the ramp to breathe, slow her racing heart, calm her anxiety. She entered the Doctor’s lab.

The only light burning inside the lab came from the lamp over the drafting table. She took a moment to adjust to the dimness, and she watched him work. He shuffled blueprints on the table before him, jotted illegible numbers in a column on a notepad, paused between movements to stare motionless at nothing. She could tell by the set of his shoulders, the slow and careful movements as he wrote, that the pain was bad tonight. She coughed gently before walking to him.

“I’m here,” she murmured.

He hummed a small noise of acknowledgment without looking up from the table.

She shifted her weight, balled her hands into fists to squash her fingers’ urge to fidget. “Should I make you some supper?”

With a long sigh, he put the pencil onto the table and slowly stacked the papers into a neater pile. “No, my dear, not tonight.” His voice sounded thin and faint under the strain of keeping the strain out of his voice. He didn’t meet her eyes as he pivoted the chair away from the desk and started toward the door. Sally followed close behind.

In the dark bedroom, she watched him park at a neat forty-five degree angle against the bed and lock the wheels. He sat and breathed deeply, his thin chest rising and falling, as he readied himself to make the transfer. A pang of pity shot through her. “Let me help,” she said as she started across the length of the room to him.

“No!” He barked out the word with such force it stopped her in mid-stride. He breathed deeply again. “No, Sally,” he said, calmer this time. “Thank you.”

She held her breath as if the oxygen in her lungs could buoy him up against the pull of gravity. He inched himself forward and leaned one hand on the bed. His arm on the mattress seemed to her far too frail to possibly bear his weight; his small hand’s grip on the armrest looked precarious and shaky. She felt panic rising inside her at the double bind he’d placed her in – prevented from fulfilling her functional duty with a conflicting order she couldn’t disobey. She readied herself to rush forward. But in a moment so fast she almost missed it, he eased himself the short distance from the chair to the bed. He sat for a moment, and they both breathed a sigh in unison.

While he settled himself back against the pillows, she got to work. Among the miscellaneous clutter on the nightstand, she found the jar of salve she was looking for. It had taken countless attempts over the past month to get it right, as she experimented with the plants and honed the built-in botanical knowledge he’d instilled in her. Finally she’d found a formula that seemed to be working. She unscrewed the lid and the room filled with the heady scent of her concoction – the gust of camphor billowing before the gentler rosemary and the thin, sweet note of peppermint. She could see his expression softening and his muscles beginning to unknot at the mere aroma, the promise of the coming relief.

She helped ease his clothes off him, arm by arm and leg by leg, and then she knelt on the bed at his feet. The salve she poured in her palm was oily and syrupy-thick; it absorbed her body heat until it was warm as bathwater. She rubbed her hands together and then started her work on his legs. Beginning down at the ankles, she massaged up toward the tops of his thighs and back down again, carefully working the atrophied muscles and calming the turmoil of the misfiring nerves. 

Since her hands knew the motions from innate muscle memory, she kept her eyes on his face. If only the townspeople could see him as she saw him now. To everyone else, he was nothing more than a cantankerous old man – brilliant, of course, but intolerably cranky. They had no idea. Maybe they would all see him in a new and reverent light, if only they knew his irritability was masking the constant presence of the chronic pain. If only they could watch his hard-lined face soften at her touch and the relief it brought. If they could hear how his gruff and commanding public voice diminished into the small, whispery moans as her hands quieted the spasms that seared through him. 

Overcome with the wash of emotion, she abandoned her task and leaned over the length of his body. He opened his eyes when her hair brushed against his face, and he smiled as she bent to kiss his forehead. “Sally,” he breathed.

She brushed her fingers across his brow, at the relaxed space where the pained creases had been. “Are you ready to sleep?”

He reached up and caught her hand in his, pulled it down to run the tips of her fingers against his lips. “Not yet.”

She smiled. She took her hand from his and stroked a slow, winding path all the way down his torso. This was innate muscle memory, too – she had manifested into being with the feeling of his cock in her hand already memorized. It was just as she understood the plants in the graveyard, the equipment in the lab, the processes of distilling the herbs and extracting the oils. She knew, without knowing how, the way to touch his body as if it were her own.

Her hand, slick with salve, stroked him until he swelled to full hardness. He was a perfect fit for her grasp. Everything he created was always seamlessly fitted to its purpose.

When she pulled up her dress and straddled him, his hips arched weakly in an attempt to meet hers. She could palpably feel his ever-present frustration at himself, at the malfunctioning and defective chassis of his body. “Shhh,” she whispered, as if to comfort a weeping child. She pressed her hand to his chest, to where his heart raced beneath the ripples of his ribcage. He closed his eyes. With careful movements she lowered herself down onto him and let his erection push inside her. They both breathed a sigh in unison.

She rocked against him, rolling her body with a grace she never managed on her feet. She felt her pulse speed, her skin flush ruddy with pleasure, but she kept her focus on him. His face showed none of the relentless pain, nothing but ecstasy. Into her mind flashed the memory of the corpse woman’s crude words, but Sally hurriedly pushed the thoughts away. Of course he would design her this way, with a body that felt no unpleasant sensation, no pain at all – she was his vicarious window into a world he’d never know. But for now she knew the pain had receded, forced away from the forefront of his awareness, eclipsed by the sweet feel of her grinding against him. She would hold the window open for him as long as she could. 

She edged him up toward orgasm and then nudged him back down again, over and over, balancing him on the threshold but keeping him from passing through. If she could find a way to make it last forever, to keep his pain buried beneath the waves of pleasure for the rest of his life, she would have done it gladly. But the longer she rocked, the more she felt herself relentlessly propelled toward her own climax even as she tried to hold him away from his. She tried to keep all her focus trained on him, on the pattern of his breaths, the soft parting of his lips. But soon the only input her brain could process was the slide of his cock within her, hard and hot and slippery with the salve and her own arousal, as she rode him harder and faster. Her resolve melted with the wet heat that swelled between her legs, and she bore down hard against him as the orgasm rippled through her.

She came down quickly with a sharp stab of disappointment in her selfishness. She tried to pick up her rhythm again, to keep rocking him up and back from the precipice. But all her muscles felt too wobbly and weak, as spent as the dying contractions of pleasure within her. She couldn’t meet his eyes. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

He gave a deep, languid laugh; she could feel the vibrations of it against her thighs where they still pressed against him. “My sweet Sally. Sorry? Whatever for?”

She couldn’t speak.

He grasped her gently around the waist, and she pulled herself up off his erection. His sharp intake of breath mingled with her own quiet moan as his cock slid out of her. She curled up beside him and tried to catch her breath.

“But you know how I love to watch that,” he said in a low voice. “Your perfect climax. So elegant in its precision. I specifically fine-tuned your pubococcygeus muscle to experience intercontraction intervals at a rate of no less than once every third of a second. Your pelvic muscular exertion force increases and then decreases in the most beautiful, most flawless amplitudes of contraction pressure waveforms.” His hand moved over his cock as he spoke, and his breathing came in forceful little hitches. “They could frame a graph of your orgasm to display in an art museum. They should carve it into the marble of my headstone when I’m gone.”

She reached over and slipped her hand onto his cock beneath his, and he let his arm fall away as she began to stroke him. His eyes closed.

“You’re a masterpiece, Sally.” His voice tapered off into a wordless groan as he leaned his body into hers. She kept stroking as his moans faded into breathless gasps and then silence. He tensed his body and threw his head back, and he climaxed into her hand, coating her fingers with warm streams of ejaculate. Only after the orgasm tapered off and died did he begin to breathe again.

Sally held him lightly in her hand as the blood left his spent erection. She didn’t move until his cock was fully soft, until the semen all over her hand had grown cold, until his ragged panting transformed into the slow and even breaths of sleep. The hem of her dress sufficed for a desultory cleanup; she was too tired to properly deal with it. She spooned her body up to his sleeping form. Her every curve slid into place against his. Seamlessly fitted to its purpose.

 

~+~+~

 

When she was two months old, the restlessness set in.

By then, the staring had all but stopped. There was never a warm welcome, a fondness, a sense of belonging. And there were still the lingering looks at the tracks of her stitches, and the startled doubletakes at her detached limbs. But the town began to rely on her unique skills – the herbal tinctures, the skillful sewing, the acts of disembodied bravery retrieving balls out of gutters and kites out of trees. She felt, if not loved and accepted, at least useful. But it wasn’t enough.

She first began questioning his authority as she stood over a bubbling stockpot of spiderleg borscht. She swirled it around with a wooden spoon, and she realized she’d cooked this from a recipe that she had never learned or invented. It was just there, preprogrammed into her head, inborn as her automatic knowledge of how to walk and breathe, how to harvest and distill, how to fuck.

She whirled from the stove with such force that red droplets flew from her spoon in all directions. “I never _asked_ to have soup recipes crammed in my head,” she snapped, without preamble, in the Doctor’s direction.

The Doctor, who had merely been passing through on his way to the dry storage closet, put on the brakes and squinted up at her. “I beg your pardon?”

“Maybe I don’t want to know how to make spiderleg borscht. Maybe I want that brain space back for the memories I actually choose.” She crossed her arms and glowered down at him.

The Doctor nodded, still clearly confused. “If you’d prefer to cook something else for lunch – ”

“This isn’t about _lunch_. This is about _choice_. I don’t get a choice in any of this. You wanted a little housekeeper, so you poured all these stupid recipes and cleaning tips into my brain. You wanted a little nurse, so you dumped all this herbal remedy nonsense into me. You wanted a little cockslut – ”

“Sally, Sally, please.” He leaned forward and gripped the armrests as if he was actually about to try to stand and walk to her. “Hush. Stop. Here.” He extended his hand to her. Angry as she was, she was powerless to refuse him. She slipped her hand into his. “Sally, this is normal.”

A harsh laugh jettisoned from her mouth. “ _Normal_? How can you tell me this is – ”

“What you’re feeling is normal,” he went on. “A perfectly typical phase of cognitive development. I honestly didn’t expect you to arrive here so soon, but that just further proves the extraordinary artistry of your design.” 

She rolled her eyes and tried to pull her hand away, but he held her tight.

“You’ve gone beyond simple self-examination into critically assessing the sociocultural norms and assumptions you perceive. That leaves you with a feeling of incongruity, of discontent. You’re restless.”

“I’m restless,” she repeated in a dull voice. It was somehow demeaning to have her storm of emotions reduced to one simple, innocuous adjective.

“Yes. You can’t help it. It’s a phase; it will pass. It’s all part of the process of psychosocial development. You’re in flux, in transformation. You just have to be patient.”

She gave a scoffing snort.

He just held her hand more tightly. “Imagine. Two months ago you were nothing but inanimate parts on my operating table. You weren’t even _you_. And already, look how far you’ve come.”

The pressure of her feelings for him pushed up against her diaphragm. Even in this state of anger, they still flowed unstoppably through the foundation of her entire existence. “I hate that I can’t hate you,” she murmured. 

He only smiled and drew her in closer by the hand, pulling until she slid onto the chair, one knee at a time, straddling across his lap. With automatic movements she undid the front of his trousers and pulled out his already-hard cock. When she lifted her dress and slid him inside her, he let out a sigh that echoed the identical sigh coming from her own throat. For a moment she sat still as they pressed together in the cramped chair, foreheads leaning against each other, flush as puzzle pieces. Seamlessly fitted.

“Does this mean I don’t have to make you spiderleg borscht anymore?” she whispered as she began to move her hips.

He only gave a dreamy half-smile as he twined his fingers through her hair. The wooden spoon clattered to the floor.

 

 

~+~+~

 

 

She was three months old, and she was in love.

It was her first town meeting, her first glimpse into the local politics scene. The Doctor’s chair-accessible spot was right up in the front row, off on the far left. Her view of the stage was direct and unimpeded when Jack Skellington took the podium.

The discussion centered on the upcoming Halloween festivities, the intricate planning surrounding their biggest night of the year. She’d been following along fairly well up till that point. But when the unsteady follow-spot illuminated Jack in its rusty yellow light, everything changed. Something twisted deep inside her, something that felt awful and wonderful all at once. She gripped the wood of the bench to keep herself quiet and still. The Doctor turned to her, studied her for a long moment, and returned his attention to the stage.

The more Jack Skellington talked, the worse it got. He talked with his hands, his passion uncontainable by mere words, and the fluid movements of every limb and every digit pulled tides of longing out of her. His voice hypnotized every listener in the room – but to her, the melodic cadence of his speech seemed to wrap itself around the closed fist of her heart, prying it open petal by petal, leaving her feeling raw and exposed and blinking in the sudden light and warmth.

She couldn’t take another moment. It didn’t matter that she would miss more of his musical voice, his graceful gestures. It didn’t matter that the whole town could witness her, from her place in the front, scrambling out of the bench and stumbling toward the door.

When the Doctor arrived home, she was up in her room, sitting before the mirror in the dark. She didn’t look up when he wheeled himself through the door.

The chair’s whirring stopped as he pulled up just a little behind her. He stared at her staring into the mirror. Long moments passed like rolling fog. At last the Doctor let out a sigh that shattered the silence. “Well, my dear, what exactly was the thought process here?”

She pressed her lips together and kept her eyes fixed on her own face. At last she murmured, “I never understood the stitches.”

He took an extra moment, visibly poring over each word of her short sentence, before he replied. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”

“Of course you do. The stitches, these ridiculous stitches, the ones _you_ put all over my body. What exactly was the thought process _here_? You can create life out of nothing, but you can’t make inconspicuous sutures?”

He hummed a little sound that might have been understanding, or perhaps was just meant to placate her. She waited for more of an answer, but it didn’t come. “I know what it is,” she said. “You designed me to be hideous. So nobody else would ever want me. Admit it.” Her voice wavered on the last syllables. The Doctor said nothing, and her anger mounted. “Admit it!” she screamed.

He rolled forward and grabbed her hand, pulled her to turn toward him and away from the mirror. “I will admit no such thing,” he hissed. “And you’re being completely irrational.”

The way he studied her, like an engine mechanic examining defective gears, sent tremors of fury through her whole body. “Stop trying to fix me, I’m not _broken_ ,” she snapped. Something inside her buckled under the weight of the rage, something in flux, transforming. She burst into tears. 

“Oh, my poor Sally.” He pulled her closer, and she slid off her chair to the floor at his feet. Though it was the last thing she wanted, she didn’t have the energy to resist as he leaned her head onto his lap and stroked her hair. “Suddenly so self-conscious. I should have known better, I should have realized you’re not ready for an outing of that magnitude.” She felt the feeble need to contradict him, but she couldn’t bring herself to argue. He pressed on. “You think the stitches are hideous, do you? You think I ought to have created an unmarred expanse of nothing, hidden every connection and join?” He traced his hand along her temple, to the tracks of black thread that snaked past her eye and back down her jaw to disappear into her hairline. “You’re a miracle of science. My masterpiece. Why shouldn't I want to display every ingenious facet of your composition? Why should I hide the seams of my design?”

She let out a long, shuddering breath. “Of course. You made me hideous to show off your cleverness.”

“What? No, my dear, you – ”

“Without these stitches, I would be simply Sally. But this way, everyone will always see the Doctor’s amazing creation.” She pictured Jack Skellington again, his lithe and balletic body, his sweeping grace. How stupid she was to even consider such an impossible fantasy. The tears welled up in her eyes again.

His hand kept stroking her hair. “You foolish girl. Why you’re even concerned about this is beyond me. What does it matter what anybody else thinks? You’re mine. I made you with my own hands. And I think every one of those stitches is beautiful.” He laughed quietly. “You could never want to leave me. You’d never find a better life out there with anyone else. You’re designed to the exact specifications to complement me in every way. A seamless fit.”

The hopelessness twisted inside her. She reached up and pressed her hand to her chest over her burning heart. He’s really not so clever, she thought. Such a major malfunction in his so-called masterpiece creation: she could feel pain after all. She shut her eyes and let the beginnings of her new plans drift into shape. She began silently calculating the toxicity thresholds of deadly nightshade, until she fell asleep.


End file.
